Kim Goodwin on designing culture

This article first appeared in issue 242 of .net magazine – the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers.

One company is known for its fabulous design. The other is known for its frustrating products. Both have terrific design teams, so how can this be? The answer pretty much always comes down to culture.

By culture, I mean a set of invisible, shared assumptions that drive behaviour and decision-making. For example, a statement that we ‘just don’t have time’ for user research is not a fact; it’s an assumption that this activity is less valuable than something else. We have to design our methods and project management practices to fit the environment. I find it helpful to start with an organisational culture model such as the Competing Values Framework (CVF). Real cultures are a blend of all four archetypes, but tend to be dominated by one or two of them.

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